Songs of America's beginnings

Jay Ungar and Molly Mason keep Traditional American Music alive

Posted: Thursday, April 11, 2002

By Julie PowellCorrespondent

Now as much as ever, people long to embrace, understand and honor that which is American. It's fiddler and composer Jay Ungar's belief that Americans long for traditional American music, even if they don't realize it.

His point was proven in part by Ken Burns' PBS documentary on the Civil War. Ungar wrote a haunting tune, called ''Ashokan Farewell,'' which became the theme from the Grammy Award-winning soundtrack of ''The Civil War.''

That one melody brought an onslaught of media attention to both Ungar and American traditional music, opening peoples' ears to a music many never knew existed.

It is this music that Ungar and his family band bring to Hugh Hodgson Hall on Saturday in their program ''American Classics: The Civil War and Beyond.''

The group features Ungar on fiddle, his wife Molly Mason on guitar, his daughter Ruth on guitar, ukulele and fiddle, and Michael Merenda on banjo and percussion. All four sing.

''The music we play forms the roots of American popular music,'' says Ungar. ''Before the 1850s there was not a definable American music. It was more like European music transplanted. Stephen Foster began writing in the 1840s and 1850s and had many hits.

"When the Civil War arrived, the hopes, dreams, struggles and aspirations of a people cried out for expression," Ungar continues. "Songwriting and singing gained a tremendous importance culturally and spiritually."

Ungar says music also became an industry for the first time in America. "Some songs sold more than 1 million copies of sheet music.''

Jay Ungar and Molly Mason

Traditional American Music

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, April 13

Where: Hugh Hodgson Concert Hall, UGA Performing Arts Center

Cost: $17 rear balcony, $21 orchestra, front balcony

Call: (706) 542-4400

''These songs helped keep soldiers able to fight and people on the home front OK,'' he says. ''There were songs about loss and longing, wishing to be home, losing a loved one and being estranged from family.

"Those songs remained tremendously popular for generations and generations both in memory right up until 1950 when I heard all of it.''

Upon hearing this music and sensing a connection, especially in these songs, Ungar and a few friends headed South from their homes in New York in search of the musicians who could teach them how to play it.

Since then, Ungar and wife Mason have become two of America's best-known folk musicians through their work on numerous PBS documentary soundtracks and as frequent guests on Garrison Keillor's National Public Radio show ''A Prairie Home Companion.''

They are musicians of enormous talent who draw their repertoire and inspiration from a wide range of American musical styles: 19th-century classics, lively Appalachian, Cajun and Celtic fiddle tunes and favorites from the golden age of country and swing, along with their own songs, fiddle tunes, and orchestral compositions.

''It is the opportunity to get in touch with deep emotions that makes this music so special to Molly and me,'' explains Ungar.

''To get to share that with an audience, to make that connection, is the greatest joy we get,'' he says

Perhaps it is this love of music and its connections that prompted Keillor to call the work of Ungar and Mason ''an apotheosis of American traditional music.''